Fifteen
Years in
the Arena.

Alex Yarijanian graduated Summa Cum Laude from UC Riverside with a BA in Psychology — a degree that would prove more useful in healthcare than anyone expected. Understanding how people make decisions, how systems shape behavior, and why institutions resist change became the lens through which he would approach every problem that followed.

He went on to earn a Master of Science in Healthcare Administration from California State University, Long Beach, finishing with a 4.0 GPA. The academic record was a signal, but the real education was happening in parallel — in the gap between what healthcare promised and what it actually delivered to the people who needed it most.

The early career years were spent inside the machine — learning how payers think, how providers contract, and where the structural misalignments live. Alex worked across payer strategy, network development, and value-based care contracting, accumulating the kind of operational knowledge that only comes from being in the room when deals are made and when they fall apart.

At Humana, he worked on Medicare Advantage directory accuracy — reducing inaccuracy rates by 37.1% across a network that touched millions of beneficiaries. The work was unglamorous and precise. It was also exactly the kind of problem that determines whether a health plan functions or fails at scale.

As VP of Payer Strategy at Mahmee, Alex structured a $58 million Medicaid savings contract — one of the largest maternal health value-based agreements in California at the time. The work required translating clinical outcomes into contractual language that payers would sign, and building the operational infrastructure to deliver on what was promised.

The contract became a proof point for what value-based maternal health could look like at scale. It also reinforced a conviction that had been building for years: the gap between what the evidence supports and what gets contracted is almost always a strategy problem, not a clinical one.

Today, Alex splits his time between leading Carenodes, advising early-stage digital health companies, and speaking at conferences and health systems on payer strategy, population health, and the structural changes that will define the next decade of American healthcare.

The through-line across all of it is the same: healthcare is a system of incentives, contracts, and human decisions. Change the incentives, structure the contracts correctly, and make better decisions — and you can move the system. That's the work. It's slow, it's specific, and it compounds.